That's the state of cat affairs: rather than sulking in my bedroom, Fleabus now comes out and glowers. Progress. Relatedly, only for the purpose of this Saturday-lazy post, I got this in my email yesterday from Al Franken:
Dear BLCKDGRD,
One day I'll have the opportunity to raise my hand and repeal DOMA. But first we have to make that happen -- and as much as I wish I could, I can't talk to every single person from one coast to the other and tell them about our petition. That's our challenge.
The solution? Online ads. They're fast and effective, and best of all, they're inexpensive to run. And this new kind of advertising is so efficient, that the $5 and $10 contributions that our supporters have been chipping in are making a huge impact and helping us grow our coalition faster than we ever thought possible.
I thought I'd killed all the email subscriptions I'd stupidly signed up for when I was a stupid ticket-pulling moron, so I canceled this one, and when the Will You Tell Us Why You're Canceling dialogue box came up I typed:
Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?
It's true! and they've a home game tonight I won't even try and taunt a result out of, though the best news is I'm meeting a friend of this blog (and maybe yours) before the game for a beer, he's mentioned in the poem below.
Daily Gaddis:
- Plagiarized? Recktall Brown sat back. With a quick look over his desk, locating a manuscript, he pushed it forward with one hand and took off his glasses with the other. He fixed the figure across from him with his sharp eyes, and laughed. - Take a look at this, he said, as the quivering yellow fingers received it. - This is lifted. The whole God-damned novel is lifted. One of our readers spotted it the first thing. A lawyer went over it, and it's safe. a couple of things changed around, it's safe and it's good, and it will sell.
- Hard and complicated aren't synonyms.
- The death and next life of Keynes.
- Do any leading Democrats, in heart of hearts, disagree w/Romney.
- Limbaugh complains Fox not cracker enough!
- Paul versus FMFML: The difference is that for anarcho-syndicalists like Chomsky, the good guys of history are the workers and ordinary folk, whereas for Libertarians, it is entrepreneurs. Both theories depend on a naive reading of social interest. Right anarchists seem not to be able to perceive that without government, corporations would reduce us all to living in company towns on bad wages and would constantly be purveying to us bad banking, tainted food, dangerous drugs, etc. I mean, they behave that way when they can get away with it even when there is supposed government oversight, usually by capturing the government oversight agency that should be regulating them and then defanging it (e.g. BP and the Minerals Management Service). On the environment, private companies would never ever curb emissions without government intervention because of the problem of the commons. (Tellingly, Ron Paul calls global climate change a “hoax.”)
- British crackerism.
- British crackerism.
- Deliberate misunderstanding.
- Deeper understanding.
- Anniversaries, anesthesia, Elizabeth Bishop.
- On that sillyass list of overrated books.
- My favorite three radio hours of the week.
- Pynchon's Inherent Vice playlist.
- New Feist. My tastes have changed; the stuff I once love doesn't move me anymore, so please take this meh to this song with that disclaimer, but major meh.
- Shameless use of Teap-baiting as excuse to play The Minutemen.
- Rupture.
E-MAIL FROM AN OWL
Frederick Seidel
The irrigation system wants it to be known it irrigates
The garden,
It doesn't water it.
It is a stickler about this!
Watering is something done by hand.
Automatic catering naturally
Does a better job than a hand with a watering can can.
Devised in Israel to irrigate their orange groves,
It drips water to the chosen, one zone at a time.
Drip us this day our daily bread, or, rather, this night,
Since a drop on a leaf in direct sunlight can make
A magnifying glass that burns an innocent at the stake.
The sprinkler system hisses kisses on a timer
Under an exophthalmic sky of stars.
Tonight my voice will stare at you forever.
I click on Send,
And send you this perfumed magic hour.
